What a nasty, horrible God is the one in which they believe. What nasty, horrible sentiments they have expressed in the wake of so much suffering by their fellow human beings. What a nasty, cynical thing they do to promote their own religion by using this tragedy and other recent catastrophic events to “win converts” for Jesus.

Naming them charlatans and hypocrites does not do justice to the utter lack of compassion that resides in their hearts.

And the blogger cites my blog as an example of a fundamentalist who argues that God struck Japan “because the Japanese are all atheists.”

Well, first thing, did I actually even say that? I quote myself from that article:

But is Japan’s unbelief the reason why Japan just got hit with an awful tsunami?

My answer is, “How on earth should I know?”

I cite passages of Scripture that clearly indicate that a disaster does not necessarily mean that God is judging someone, such as Luke 13:1-5. I could have just as easily also cited passages such as John 9:1-3 about Jesus’ distinction between suffering and sin. I could have cited 2 Peter 3:9, describing God’s patience with sinners rather than His haste to judge. These passages aren’t at all out of tune with what I was saying. And I actually DO single out by name for criticism men like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell who have immediately pronounced the wrath of God following some disaster.

I begin my article saying, “That headline is a deliberate provoker. But please let me explain why I used that headline before you erupt one way or another.” Then I proceed to state two undisputed facts: that Japan is atheist, and that Japan got hit by a disaster. I urge someone to actually read the article and reflect on the possibilities. But Boomantribune is an example of most of the atheists who cross-posted or commented to my article by NOT being someone who wanted to read or reflect; he or she is someone who refused to look beneath atheist ideology and immediately began demonizing the other side to “win converts” for his religion of atheism. [And let’s get this straight: atheism IS a religion. “Religion” does not need to depend upon belief in God, or Buddhism would not qualify as a religion. The courts have ruled that atheism is a religion, and it is a simple fact that atheism has every component that any religious system has].

You can’t have a valid argument with someone like Boomantribune, I have learned. They are either too ignorant, or too dishonest, or both to accurately represent the other side’s position or arguments. They create straw men and then demolish claims that Christians like me aren’t even making.

Boomantribune viciously attacks me as harboring the “nasty, horrible sentiments they have expressed in the wake of so much suffering by their fellow human beings.” But I end my article on Japan by saying:

You need that gift of divine grace. I need that gift of divine grace. And the people of Japan desperately need it today.

I pray for those who are in Japan. I pray for their deliverance from both the tsunami and from their unbelief. And I will join with many other Christians who will send relief to the Japanese people, with prayers that they will look not at me, but at the Jesus who changed my heart and my life, and inspired me to give to others.

In the US, anyway, they don’t. Here’s just one study, done in 2003: The differences in charity between secular and religious people are dramatic. Religious people are 25 percentage points more likely than secularists to donate money (91 percent to 66 percent) and 23 points more likely to volunteer time (67 percent to 44 percent). And, consistent with the findings of other writers, these data show that practicing a religion is more important than the actual religion itself in predicting charitable behavior. For example, among those who attend worship services regularly, 92 percent of Protestants give charitably, compared with 91 percent of Catholics, 91 percent of Jews, and 89 percent from other religions…Note that neither political ideology nor income is responsible for much of the charitable differences between secular and religious people. For example, religious liberals are 19 points more likely than secular liberals to give to charity, while religious conservatives are 28 points more likely than secular conservatives to do so…The average annual giving among the religious is $2,210, whereas it is $642 among the secular. Similarly, religious people volunteer an average of 12 times per year, while secular people volunteer an average of 5.8 times.

And this is “secular” people who aren’t particularly religious. A lot of people rarely ever go to church, but still believe in God (basically 90% of Americans belive in God). Since the evidence is rather straightforward that the more religious one is, the more giving one is, it is justified to conclude that atheists who are less religious than the merely “secular” are even LESS giving.

And, guess what? My church has already taken its first of several offerings for Japan, and I have already given – and plan to give again.

Also, unlike too many blogs – particularly leftwing blogs, in my experience – I don’t delete anything. When the Daily Kos hatefully attacked Sarah Palin and her daughter Bristol and claimed that Bristol Palin had been impregnated by her own father with a baby, and that Sarah Palin faked being pregnant – only to have that hateful and vile lie blown away by Bristol giving birth to a child of her own – they scrubbed it like nothing had happened.

I’m not that despicable. Every single article I have ever written remains on my blog. And with all due respect, I think that gives me more credibility, not less: I don’t hit and run and then scrub the evidence of my lies.

If I post something that turns out to be wrong, I don’t destroy the evidence; I stand up and take responsibility for my words. I apologize and correct the record. As I did in the case above.

That, by the way, is the first finger, the finger of moral dishonesty pointing back at these atheists.

That’s not the way the other side plays. History is replete with atheist regimes (e.g. ANY of the officially state atheist communist regimes) destroying the record and any debate; history is replete with atheist-warped “science” making one claim after another that turned out to be entirely false. As examples, consider Java Man, Nebraska Man, Piltdown Man, Peking Man and the various other hoaxes that the “scientific community rushed to embrace in their rush to falsify theism. In some cases “scientists” created an entire community – or even an entire race of people – around totally bogus evidence in “It takes a village” style. There was the bogus notion of “uniformitarianism” by which the “scientific community” ridiculed creationists for decades until it was proven wrong by Eugene Shoemaker who documented that the theory of “catastrophism” that they had advanced for millennia had been correct all along. And then all of a sudden the same evolutionary theory that had depended upon uniformitarianism suddenly morphed into a theory that depended upon catastrophism. It morphed so that it was equally true with both polar opposites.

In any words, evolution is no more “scientifically falsifiable” than even the most ardent young earth creationist claim. Their standard is impossible to prove. I mean, you show me that God “could not possibly have” created the earth.

The whole way they sold evolution was a lie.

There is NEVER an admission of guilt or an acknowledgment of error by these people. They simply suppress or destroy the evidence, or “morph” their argument, or anything but acknowledge that just maybe they should be open-minded and question their presuppositions.

For the scientist who has lived by faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries. -Robert Jastrow, God and the Astronomers

But those are extremely rare, indeed. The rest of the atheist-assuming “scientific community” is all about saying, “Move on, folks. Nothing to see here. Why don’t you look at our new sleight-of-hand display over in this corner instead?”

Supporting the paradigm may even require what in other contexts would be called deception. As Niles Eldredge candidly admitted, “We paleontologists have said that the history of life supports [the story of gradual adaptive change], all the while knowing it does not.”[ 1] Eldredge explained that this pattern of misrepresentation occurred because of “the certainty so characteristic of evolutionary ranks since the late 1940s, the utter assurance not only that natural selection operates in nature, but that we know precisely how it works.” This certainty produced a degree of dogmatism that Eldredge says resulted in the relegation to the “lunatic fringe” of paleontologists who reported that “they saw something out of kilter between contemporary evolutionary theory, on the one hand, and patterns of change in the fossil record on the other.”[ 2] Under the circumstances, prudent paleontologists understandably swallowed their doubts and supported the ruling ideology. To abandon the paradigm would be to abandon the scientific community; to ignore the paradigm and just gather the facts would be to earn the demeaning label of “stamp collector.”

[…]

Naturalistic philosophy has worked out a strategy to prevent this problem from arising: it labels naturalism as science and theism as religion. The former is then classified as knowledge, and the latter as mere belief. The distinction is of critical importance, because only knowledge can be objectively valid for everyone; belief is valid only for the believer, and should never be passed off as knowledge. The student who thinks that 2 and 2 make 5, or that water is not made up of hydrogen and oxygen, or that the theory of evolution is not true, is not expressing a minority viewpoint. He or she is ignorant, and the job of education is to cure that ignorance and to replace it with knowledge. Students in the public schools are thus to be taught at an early age that “evolution is a fact,” and as time goes by they will gradually learn that evolution means naturalism.

In short, the proposition that God was in any way involved in our creation is effectively outlawed, and implicitly negated. This is because naturalistic evolution is by definition in the category of scientific knowledge. What contradicts knowledge is implicitly false, or imaginary. That is why it is possible for scientific naturalists in good faith to claim on the one hand that their science says nothing about God, and on the other to claim that they have said everything that can be said about God. In naturalistic philosophy both propositions are at bottom the same. All that needs to be said about God is that there is nothing to be said of God, because on that subject we can have no knowledge.

I stand behind a tradition that has stood like an anvil while being pounded by one generation of unbelievers after another. That tradition remains constant because it is founded upon the unchanging Word of God. My adversaries constantly change and morph their positions, all the while just as constantly claiming that their latest current iteration is correct.

That is the second finger of intellectual dishonesty which so thoroughly characterizes atheism and anything atheism seems to contaminate with its assumptions.

Lastly, there is the finger of ethical dishonesty that is the ocean that the “walking fish” of atheism swims in. [Btw, when I see that fish riding a bicycle I’ll buy their “walking fish” concept].

Basically, for all the “moral outrage” of atheists who want to denounce Christians for their God’s “evil judgments,” atheism itself has absolutely no moral foundation to do so whatsoever. And the bottom line is that they are people who attack the five-thousand year tradition of Scripture with their feet firmly planted in midair.

To put it simply, William Lane Craig demolishes any shred of a claim that atheism can offer any ultimate meaning, any ultimate value, or any ultimate purpose whatsoever. And so atheism denounces Christianity and religion from the foundation of an entirely empty and profoundly worthless worldview. Everyone should read this incredibly powerful article. I guarantee you will learn something, whatever your perspective on religion.

The thing I would say is that atheists denounce God and Christians from some moral sort of moral posture. Which comes from what, exactly? Darwinism, or more precisely, social Darwinism? The survival of the fittest? A foundation that comes from the “secure” footing of a random, meaningless, purposeless, valueless and entirely accidental existence?

As atheists tee off on God and at Christians for being “nasty” and “horrible,” what is their foundation from which to judge?

First of all, what precisely would make one a “nasty” or “horrible” atheist?

“God’s not unjust, he doesn’t actually exist. We’ve been deceived. If God existed, he’d have made the world more just… I’ll lend you a book and you’ll see.”

Mao Tse Tung was an atheist:

“Our God is none other than the masses of the Chinese people. If they stand up and dig together with us, why can’t these two mountains be cleared away?” [Mao Tse Tung, Little Red Book, “Self-Reliance and Arduous Struggle chapter 21”].

Hitler described to them that “after difficult inner struggles I had freed myself of my remaining childhood religious conceptions. I feel as refreshed now as a foal on a meadow” (Ernst Helmreich, “The German Churches Under Hitler,” p. 285).

Joseph Goebbels, a top member of Hitler’s inner circle, noted in his personal diary, dated 8 April 1941 that “The Führer is a man totally attuned to antiquity. He hates Christianity, because it has crippled all that is noble in humanity.” Now, one may easily lie to others, but why lie to your own private diary?

Goebbels also notes in a diary entry in 1939 a conversation in which Hitler had “expressed his revulsion against Christianity. He wished that the time were ripe for him to be able to openly express that. Christianity had corrupted and infected the entire world of antiquity.”

Hitler also said, “Our epoch will certainly see the end of the disease of Christianity.” [Hitler’s Table Talk, Enigma Books; 3rd edition October 1, 2000, p. 343].

Albert Speer, another Nazi in Hitler’s intimate inner circle, stated that Hitler said, “You see, it’s been our misfortune to have the wrong religion… Why did it have to be Christianity with its meekness and flabbiness?”

Konrad Heiden quoted Hitler as stating, “We do not want any other god than Germany itself.” [Heiden, Konrad A History of National Socialism, A.A. Knopf, 1935, p. 100].

“The atom bomb is nothing to be afraid of,” Mao told Nehru, “China has many people. . . . The deaths of ten or twenty million people is nothing to be afraid of.” A witness said Nehru showed shock. Later, speaking in Moscow, Mao displayed yet more generosity: he boasted that he was willing to lose 300 million people, half of China’s population.” [Annie Dillard, “The Wreck of Time” in Harper’s from January 1998].

Mao put his disregard for human life and the lives of his own people to terrible work:

LEE EDWARDS, CHAIRMAN, VICTIMS OF COMMUNISM MEMORIAL FOUNDATION: In 1959 to 1961 was the so-called “great leap forward” which was actually a gigantic leap backwards in which he tried to collectivize and communize agriculture.

And they came to him after the first year and they said, “Chairman, five million people have died of famine.” He said, “No matter, keep going.” In the second year, they came back and they said, “Ten million Chinese have died.” He said, “No matter, continue.” The third year, 20 million Chinese have died. And he said finally, “Well, perhaps this is not the best idea that I’ve ever had.”

CHANG: When he was told that, you know, his people were dying of starvation, Mao said, “Educate the peasants to eat less. Thus they can benefit – they can fertilize the land.”

Did that somehow disqualify him from being an atheist? How? Based on what foundation?

Let me simply point out that the most evil human beings in human history and the most murderous and oppressive political regimes in human history have the strange tendency to be atheist. It would seem to me that these atheists should frankly do a lot less talking smack and a lot more shutting the hell up. But two verses from Scripture illustrate why they don’t: 1) The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God'” (Psalm 14:1) and 2) “A fool does not delight in understanding, But only in revealing his own mind” (Proverbs 18:2).

Let’s talk about “evil” for a few moments. I have already begun addressing the “third finger” that points back at atheists when they denounce Christians or God. But the idea of “evil” makes that “finger” the middle one.

Christians talk about evil. A lot of people do. Even atheists routinely do. But what is their foundation for evil? What is “evil”? Most give answers such as, “Murder or rape is evil.” But those would at best only qualify as examples of evil – not a definition that would allow us to make moral judgments. Christians have an actual answer. They point out that “evil” is a perversion from the way things ought to be. But what “oughtness” is there in a random, purposeless, meaningless and valueless universe that was spat out by nothing more than pure chance?

Let’s just say at this point that the atheists are right in what is in reality a straw man attack of God? So what? I ask “so what?” because even if what they were saying were somehow true, by what standard would either God or Christians be “nasty” or “horrible”? What is the objective, transcendent standard that stands above me, that stands above every Christian on the planet, that stands above the entire human race across time and space and holds it accountable, such that if Christians or even God do X or say Y, or believe Z they are “nasty” or “horrible”?

It turns out that they don’t have one. And in fact, their very worldview goes so far as to literally deny the very possibility of one. At best – and I would argue at worst – we are trapped in a world in which might makes right, and the most powerful dictator gets to make the rules. Because there is nothing above man that judges man and says, “This is the way, walk in it.” There is only other men – and men disagree with one another’s standards – leaving us with pure moral relativism.

And if moral relativism is true, then the atheists STILL lose. It would be a tie, given that atheists have no more claim to being “good” than any other human being or group of human beings, no matter how despicable and murderous they might be. But they would lose because there are a lot fewer atheists (137 million) than there are, say, Christians (2.3 billion). And it only remains for Christians to disregard their superior moral and ethical system just long enough to rise up and annihilate all the smart-mouthed atheists, and then say afterward, “Boy, we sure feel guilty for having done THAT. Let’s pray for forgiveness!” And the only possible defense atheists would have would be to abandon their “survival of the fittest” mentality and embrace superior Christian morality and cry out, “Thou shalt not kill!”

Even if Christians don’t wipe out the atheists physically, most would readily agree that the Christian worldview is still far stronger than the atheist one. Dinesh D’Souza makes a great argument to illustrate this on pages 15-16 of What’s So Great About Christianity that shows why religion is clearly the best team. He says to imagine two communities – one filled with your bitter, cynical atheists who believe that morality just happened to evolve and could have evolved very differently; and one filled with Bible-believing Christians who embrace that life and their lives have a purpose in the plan of a righteous God who put His moral standards in our hearts. And he basically asks, “Which community is going to survive and thrive?”

As a Christian, I don’t have all the answers (although I can certainly answer the question immediately above). I am a human being and my mind cannot contain the infinite plan of an infinitely complex and holy God. But I have placed my trust in a God who made the world and who has a plan for His creation which He is bringing to fruition. And that worldview doesn’t just give me explanatory powers that atheism by its very nature entirely lacks, but it gives me a strength that I never had before. Even when evil and disaster and suffering befall me beyond my ability to comprehend, I can say with Job – the master of suffering:

“But as for me, I know that my Redeemer lives, and he will stand upon the earth at last. And after my body has decayed, yet in my body I will see God! I will see him for myself. Yes, I will see him with my own eyes. I am overwhelmed at the thought!” Job 19:25-27 (NLT).

8 Responses to “The Three Fingers Pointing Back At Atheists When Atheists Point A Finger At Christians About Evil And Judgment”

Hello! I am an atheist, though I was raised Christian, educated in both Lutheran and Catholic schools. I would like to start a discussion with you, but note that references to the Bible are as validating to me as me citing Atlas Shrugged would be to you.

I agree in general with your sentiments. In most cases if I were to die, given my druthers, I would prefer my daughter was around Christian people than any other self professed collective. I believe “when in Rome…do as the Romans”, and as such I normally keep my reasoning to myself. That being said…

“Even if Christians don’t wipe out the atheists physically, most would readily agree that the Christian worldview is still far stronger than the atheist one. Dinesh D’Souza makes a great argument…why religion is clearly the best team. ”

Keep in mind that Muslim is now the majority, and they believe it is OK to physically wipe out both Atheists and Christians. They believe my daughter would make excellent property, and blowing themselves up in the name of Allah is great. So..I think it’s obvious that religions doesn’t ALWAYS make the “best team”. Take Jim and Tammy Baker, Jim Jones, any Muslim (in my opinion), the Baptists that dance with snakes, talk in ‘tongues’..to name a few. Some of the best Mass murderers were religious, albeit not to the extent many socialists are (e.g. Stalin, Hitler, etc).

Most people fled Europe for the freedom to practice their own religion. I certainly do not begrudge anyones religion up until the point when they begin to impose their beliefs upon me which gives me a problem with the Muslims.

The concept that there can exist a ‘better’ or ‘worse’ worldview, is akin to arguing that some people have better or worse bellybuttons. Is this Cynical?

Actually, Christianity is EASILY the largest “majority” religion in the world, whether you consider it in terms of raw numbers or in terms of rate of growth. The latest stats show there are 2.3 billion Christians versus 1.6 billion Muslims. And there are only 137 million atheists in the world – a number that is SHRINKING by 300 every single day.

So you are a truly arrogant bunch, in that you are so sure there is no God even though the fraction of one percent of humanity that agrees with you is so astonishingly small as to be beyond laughable. Personally, that alone would make me very much doubt my atheism.

You use a tactic that I’m now going to use against atheism in comparing Islam to Christianity and then disparaging Christianity on account of Islam.

For militant atheists, and certainly as a matter of any philosophy of religion, atheism IS a religion. Atheism offers a religious worldview in that it answers all of the same questions that a religious worldview answers (e.g., What is God? What is man? How do we explain existence? What is the nature of ultimate reality? What is the end of man? Is there a heaven? etc.). The courts have ruled more than once that atheism is a religion. And other religions – such as Buddhism – do not have a personal God. Which means that there is no reason whatsoever not to include atheism in the list of religious systems.

So you are simply false in arguing that “the sins” of religion somehow should be held against Islam or even against Christianity but not against atheism.

I write an article in which I demonstrate that Hitler was an atheist (and Nazism was applied Darwinism, btw), Mao was an atheist, Stalin was an atheist. It’s THIS article. And yet you proceed to assert the crimes against religion without ever bothering to reflect on the crimes of atheism???

You atheists wear your OWN filthy baggage. Because you as an atheist are FAR more responsible for murder and genocide and the crushing of the human spirit than even ISLAM has ever come close to accomplishing. If you’re going to hold me responsible for Islam because it is a religion (even though atheism qualifies as a religion too), then YOU’RE going to wear the sins of communism (which is actually a religion within the religion of atheism).

You have the freedom to consider the facts and change the tone of your argument, but I am certainly not going to waste my time arguing with someone from a completely false premise; that “religion” is intolerant or murderous when ATHEISM is more demonstrably intolerant and murderous than every single religion in the world COMBINED in spite of the tiny number of atheists. When you consider that there are only a few million of you out there, and yet you have murdered more than 100 million people – DWARFING all the other religions – that tact just won’t fly here.

Do you have any idea how many Christians perished in the gulags as Soviets tried to force their religion on them, Anonymous?

As to your last question whether asserting that no worldview can be “better” or “worse” than any other couldn’t be any more cynical. Or profoundly hypocritical. You start off (correctly) labelling Islam as murderous and intolerant. Which any morally intelligent human being would agree makes it an “inferior” worldview. And then you take away the very thing you argued for when it comes time to consider the moral merits of the worldview of atheism.

If you want to have a discussion with me, you have to be intellectually honest and be willing to confront your own worldview in a way that you don’t seem to be yet.

Just so you know, the way I proceed in arguing for Christianity is NOT to start with the Bible. If you believe the Bible because the Bible tells you to believe the Bible, that is quintessential circular reasoning. Rather, I begin with evidences for the existence of a personal Creator God. And then I argue that such a God would seek to save His imperiled Creation. And then I would look at each religion and ask what the evidence is that that religion is the contact from our personal Creator God. And then I would offer the life and resurrection of Jesus Christ – along with the astounding demonstrable prophetic accuracy of the Bible. And only THEN would I start quoting the Bible as a legitimate source of authority.

There’s the question as to which worldview would survive if all others were wiped out: the one which believed that we were created in the image of a God who loves us, who has a purpose for our lives, to whom we are each morally accountable and to whom we shall one day be judged with heaven or with hell; or the one that believed we were purposeless, pointless meaningless randomly-generated creatures who are accountable to nothing and will share the same fate whether they are selfish or selfless.

Christianity is a superior worldview on every level imaginable. And to presume to ignore worldviews or the consequences of adhering to worldviews is simply not either intellectually or morally honest.

Just found your site and as someone who has a taste for the well trained apologists I find your thoughts and answers very helpful.
Speaking to the question of science I once read this quote, “There is no scientific evidence that supports the notion that everything can be proved by science.” Though you would enjoy that.

Your quote rang a bell. I recalled the term that used to be used for this view that science literally WAS the end-all: it was called “scientism” and had many supporters. UNTIL IT WAS BLOWN APART because there could be found no evidence to justify the belief of scientism itself.

Man, you go on and on. There’s something called conciseness. Also, way too much quoting, just LINK for goodness sake, if I feel like reading the original, well, my mouse button works. You are full of typical believer self-aggrandizing moral outrage. I just COULD NOT, though I tried, read every word of your post but here are a couple points I think worth making:

1) Hitler was baptized Roman Catholic and never renounced his faith nor was he excommunicated. That is the standard the Roman Catholic Church itself uses to judge if someone is Catholic so by their standards, Hitler is Catholic.

Stalin was in seminary to become a monk in the Georgian Orthodox Church.

All of these tyrants ruled over societies which had a religious tradition of leader-worship: The Czars (Russian for Ceasar) ruled over the Holy Eastern Roman Empire or so they claimed and so the Eastern Orthodox Church affirmed. Germany was part of the Holy Roman Empire, consecrated by the Pope. The Emperor of China was a God. Ditto for the King of Cambodia and the Emperor of Japan. These peoples had a religious tradition of leader-worship and when the leadership changed, they continued that tradition. These tyrants were supported in their tyranny by their people who had a religious training to worship them.

2) Scientific theories change all the time, mostly by evolving in increments though sometimes there are revolutions. The initial challenge to Biblical Creation came from Geologists studying the evolution of landforms and riverbeds in England. Catastrophes such as the astroid impact that wiped out the Dinosaurs (dated to 65 million years ago) or the end-Permian extinction event (the leading theory for which is extreme global warming that wiped out multicellular life outside the temperate and polar regions) were discovered after that initial challenge. Both uniform change over millions of years and catastrophes that happened millions of years ago shaped the evolution of life AND both invalidate the Biblical account of Creation. Darwin’s theory of natural selection did not account for the catastrophes but that makes it incomplete, not wrong. In between catastrophes, natural selection operates and catastrophes function as a kind of meta-selection operating over much larger time scales which promote plants with fallow seeds and animals with flexibility.

3) Religious people get a variety of benefits from their houses of worship – entertainment, child care, ego validation but these houses of worship are “charities”. Donations to one’s house of worship are counted as “charitable” donations when you do, in fact, derive benefit from them. I suspect that much of the difference in giving disappears when you subtract donations to houses of worship or prosyletizing organizations. I realize that converting people to your religion comes from a compassionate desire to save their soul but, from my perspective, proselytizing is a complete waste of time and money and does not qualify as a charitable activity.

Man, you are an idiot There’s something called intelligence. If you want to give me attitude, I won’t waste another moment of my time on you and just block you as worthless to intelligence. Also, unlike you I actually LIKE to present the actual facts for all to see rather than wave my hand at lies like you do in your fact-free argument.

Mark Twain nailed you when he said, “A lie can get halfway around the world before the truth can put its boots on.” What that means is that liars can lie very concisely indeed. But unfortuntely, it takes a lot of work to correct the record after the liars lie. That is true here.

1) First of all, I am not a Catholic. The Catholic Church today is so messed up on so many levels it is beyond unreal. And for you to tell me that some statist religious bureaucracy that YOU DON’T EVEN BELIEVE IN says Hitler is a Christian and therefore Hitler must be a Christian merely shows how dishonest you are. If you want to throw Catholic dogma in somebody’s face – most especially since you don’t believe it yourself – you could at least ramble at a Catholic. Because you might as well be telling me what the Ayatollahs say as say that if Hitler wasn’t excommunicated by the Catholic Church, he must be a “Christian.”

What is a “Christian”? It is most certainly NOT what you say it is. Rather, a “Christian” is one who has been “born again” as Jesus described in John chapter 3. You see, you can define “Christian” any way your fool head wants to, but JESUS is the one whose definition actually matters. We find that a Christian is someone who has publicly confessed his or her sin and his or her need for the salvation that Jesus offers by faith in His substitution for our sin. And we confess him as our Savior and as the Lord of our lives. And no, Adolf Hitler never did anything of the sort.

So when you insult me by telling me that if the Catholic church sprinkles some water on a baby and that baby isn’t subsequently execommunicated by said Catholics and that person is a “Christian,” and I hear the jabberings of a true ignoramus.

Why did the pope not excommunicate Hitler? Because he continued to try to use what little influence he had on Hitler and had he ecommunicated him, he would have lost that influence. I disagree with that because I believe that you should stand up for your principles rather than play games. But the reasons that the pope did what he did are rather well documented. Unfortunately, he also feared that his precious organization would lose influence in Germany as some Germans would have stuck with their true messiah Hitler instead of Catholocism.

Like I said, I’m not a Catholic, so your attack against something an organization did or didn’t do has very little to do with me. Personally, I’m on the side of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the vry reliably Protestant Christian who was executed by the Nazis.

That said, your entire point is a lie. I HAVE documented – using lots of those “quotes” you find so disconcerting – that Adolf Hitler did in fact renounce whatever shred of Christianity his mother tried to provide him with. Here are some facts:

Hitler publicly said what he needed to say in speeches to deceive a mass population who had been bombarded with anti-Christian heresy and anti-Christian anti-Semitism, to bend them to his will. But to his inner circle he said very different things than what he said publicly. Hitler described to them that “after difficult inner struggles I had freed myself of my remaining childhood religious conceptions. I feel as refreshed now as a foal on a meadow” (Ernst Helmreich, “The German Churches Under Hitler,” p. 285).

Yes, you liar, he DID renounce Christianity.

That is documented by his closest inner circle, to whom he shared his true ideas in the way he NEVER shared them with the people he lied to and led to hell. Let me just quote some of them, knowing how people like you hate the truth and therefore hate those damn quotes that reveal it:

What else did those closest in Hitler’s inner circle say about his “Christianity”?

“The Fuhrer is a man totally attuned to antiquity. He hates Christianity, because it has crippled all that is noble in humanity. According to Schopenhauer, Christianity and syphilis have made humanity unhappy and unfree. What a difference between the benevolent, smiling Zeus and the pain-wracked, crucified Christ. The ancient peoples’ view of God was also much nobler and more humane than the Christians’. What a difference between a gloomy cathedral and a light, airy ancient temple. He describes life in ancient Rome: clarity, greatness, monumentality. The most wonderful republic in history. We would feel no disappointment, he believes, if we were now suddenly to be transported to this old, eternal city.”

Goebbels also notes in a diary entry in 1939 a conversation in which Hitler had “expressed his revulsion against Christianity. He wished that the time were ripe for him to be able to openly express that. Christianity had corrupted and infected the entire world of antiquity.” [Elke Frölich. 1997-2008. Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels. Munich: K. G. Sauer. Teil I, v. 6, p. 272].

Hitler also said, “Our epoch will certainly see the end of the disease of Christianity.” [Hitler’s Table Talk, Enigma Books; 3rd edition October 1, 2000, p. 343].

Author Konrad Heiden quoted Hitler as stating, “We do not want any other god than Germany itself. It is essential to have fanatical faith and hope and love in and for Germany.” [Heiden, Konrad A History of National Socialism, A.A. Knopf, 1935, p. 100].

Albert Speer – another Nazi who worked extremely closely with Hitler – reports in his memoirs of a similar statement made by Hitler:

“You see, it’s been our misfortune to have the wrong religion. Why didn’t we have the religion of the Japanese, who regard sacrifice for the Fatherland as the highest good? The Mohammedan religion too would have been much more compatible to us than Christianity. Why did it have to be Christianity with its meekness and flabbiness?” [Albert Speer. 1971. Inside the Third Reich Translated by Richard Winston, Clara Winston, Eugene Davidson. New York: Macmillan. p 143; Reprinted in 1997. Inside the Third Reich: Memoirs. New York: Simon and Schuster. p. 96. ISBN 0-684-82949-5].

Adolf Hitler sounds like an atheist to me. Certainly, Hitler was absolutely not a Christian. He cynically used Christianity like he cynically used everything else that was good; he took ruthless advantage of it as simply another means by which to package his lies to the German people.

The fact of the matter is that Fascism and Nazism were quintessentially hostile to Christianity, and even to monotheism.

When convicted Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann went to the gallows, “He was in complete command of himself, nay, he was more; he was completely himself. Nothing could have demonstrated this more convincingly than the grotesque silliness of his last words. He began by stating emphatically that he was a Gottglaubiger, to express in common Nazi fashion that he was no Christian and did not believe in life after death” [p. 252].

One of the leading experts on fascism, Ernst Nolte, defined fascism as “the practical and violent resistance to transcendence” [Nolte, Three Faces of Fascism: Action Francaise, Italian Fascism, Nazi Fascism, 1965, p. 429]. Fascism was anti-God, anti-supernatural and anti-transcendence.

Gene Edward Veith says:

“It is particularly important to know, precisely, why the Nazis hated the Jews. Racism alone cannot explain the virulence of Nazi anti-Semitism. What did they see in the Jews that they thought was so inferior? What was the Jewish legacy that, in their mind, so poisoned Western culture? What were the Aryan ideals that the Nazis sought to restore, once the Jews and their influence were purged from Western culture?

The fascists aligned themselves not only against the Jews but against what the Jews contributed to Western civilization. A transcendent God, who reveals a transcendent moral law, was anathema to the fascists” [Gene Edward Veith, Jr., Modern Fascism: Liquidating the Judeo-Christian Worldview, p. 13].

By killing the Jews, Hitler intended to kill the God of the Bible.

Of Protestant Christianity, Hitler wrote:

“Protestantism… combats with the greatest hostility any attempt to rescue the nation from the embrace of its most mortal enemy, since its attitude toward the Jews just happens to be more or less dogmatically established. Yet here we arefacing the question without whose solution all other attempts at a German reawakening or resurrection are and remain absolutely senseless and impossible” (Hitler, Mein Kampf, p. 113).

Hitler talked about solving the “church problem” after he’d solved the “Jewish problem.” He said:

“The war is going to be over. The last great task of our age will be to solve the church problem. It is only then that the nation will be wholly secure” (Hitler’s Tabletalk, December 1941).

Hitler boasted that “I have six divisions of SS composed of men absolutely indifferent in matters of religion. It doesn’t prevent them from going to their deaths with serenity in their souls.”

Martin Bormann, head of the Party Chancellery and private secretary of the Fuhrer, said pointedly:

“National socialist and Christian concepts cannot be reconciled. The Christian churches build on the ignorance of people and are anxious so far as possible to preserve this ignorance in as large a part of the populace as possible; only in this way can the Christian churches retain their power. In contrast, national socialism rests on scientific foundations” (cited in Ernst Helmreich, The German Churches Under Hitler, p. 303).

At a Nazi rally a speaker proclaimed: “Who was greater, Christ or Hitler? Christ had at the time of his death twelve apostles, who, however, did not even remain true to him. Hitler, however, today has a folk of 70 million behind him. We cannot tolerate that another organization [i.e., the church] is established alongside of us that has a different spirit than ours. We must crush it. National socialism in all earnestness says: I am the Lord thy God, thou shalt have no other gods before me.”

Nazism was pagan to its very core. Carl Jung (a onetime fascist sympathizer himself) described Nazism as the revival of Wotan, who had been suppressed by Christianity but now was released. Germany was being possessed by its archetypal god. (Odajnyk, Jung and Politics, p. 87-89). The Farmer’s Almanac of 1935, published by the Ministry of Agriculture, replaced the Christian holidays with commemoration days for Wotan and Thor. And Good Friday was replaced with a memorial for those killed by Charlemagne in his efforts to convert the Saxons.

So your point one is just vaporized by something called “the truth.”

As for your 2), let me just continue by providing more documented proof that you and Hitler were FAR more on the same page than me and Christianity:

In addition, at the very heart of the Nazi’s race programs and at the center of the Holocaust was the belief in atheistic Darwinian evolution. The principle rationale for the Holocaust was that the Jews were biologically inferior, and interfered with the Nazi scientists’ efforts to aid evolution by creating a master race.

Listen to these words and tell me who wrote them:

“At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked, will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilized state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.”

It was none other than Charles Darwin himself (Darwin, C.R., “The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex,” [1871], John Murray: London, 1874, Second Edition, 1922, reprint, pp.241-242). Charles Darwin literally predicted that someone would come along and extend his Darwinism to its logical conclusion – and thus literally predicted both the Holocaust AND the motivations FOR the Holocaust.

Charles Darwin spake as a prophet, and Adolf Hitler was the messiah who fulfilled the demonic prophecy.

“If the German Volk is not strong enough and is not sufficiently prepared to offer its own blood for its existence, it should cease to exist and be destroyed by a stronger power.”

How is that not the World War II that Adolf Hitler started not being explained into a test of Darwinism that the German people had to pass to justify their existence? The simple FACT of the matter is this: that Adolf Hitler thought in entirely Darwinian terms. He decreed the Jew had failed the test of Darwinism, and believed that if the German people could not prevail in his war that THEY TOO should be exterminated.

Why is this so?

Gene Edward Veith points out that Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection had implications far beyond biology. What must be true for nature must likewise be true for the individual and society. If nature progresses by competition, struggle, and the victory of the strong over the weak, then clearly all progress must come the same way (unless we are not part of the natural system, which would mean that we were the product of divine Creation). According to Zeev Sternhall, social Darwinism in Nazi Germany “stripped the human personality of its sacramental dignity. It made no distinction between the physical life and the social life, and conceived of the human condition in terms of an unceasing struggle, whose natural outcome was the survival of the fittest” [Sternhall, “Fascist Ideology,” in Fascism: A Reader’s Guide: Analyses, Interpretations, Bibliography, p. 322].

Similarly, Sternhall pointed out how scientific positivism “felt the impact of social Darwinism, and underwent a profound change. In the latter half of the [19th]century its emphasis on deliberate and rational choice as the determining factor in human behavior gave way to new notions of heredity, race, and environment” [Sternhall, 322].

Nazism was also a direct attack against Christianity and Christian humanity.

Friedrich Nietzsche blamed Christianity, which he described as a creation of the Jews, for the denial of life that was represented in Christian morality. Gene Edward Veith points out that, in his attack on Judeo-Christian morality, Nietzsche:

“attacked the Christian value of love. Notions of compassion and mercy, he argued, favor the weak and the unfit, thereby breeding more weakness. Nature is less sentimental, but ultimately kinder, in allowing the weak to die off. The ideals of Christian benevolence cause the unfit to flourish, while those who are fit are burdened by guilt and are coerced by the moral system to serve those who are beneath them” [Veith, Modern Fascism, p. 82].

Nietzsche, epitomizing the spirit of Darwinism as applied to ethics, wrote:

We are deprived of strength when we feel pity … Pity makes suffering contagious…. Pity crosses the law of development, which is nature’s law of selection. It preserves what is right for destruction; it defends those who have been disinherited and condemned by life; and by the abundance of the failures of all kinds which it keeps alive, it gives life itself a gloomy and questionable aspect” [Nietzsche, “The Antichrist”].

In short, the Christian ethic of compassion is a kind of sentimentality that violates the laws of nature, in which the strong thrive and the weak die out.

“Justice is what the Aryan man deems just. Unjust is what he so deems” [Alfred Rosenberg, as quoted in Victor Farias, Heidegger and Nazism, 1989, pp. 205-206].

“Justice” for the Jew according to the Aryan mind possessed by Darwinism meant extermination as racially inferior and biological unfit to exist.

Thus, whatever you might want to say about whether Hitler was an atheist or not, his Nazism was inherently opposed to Judeo-Christianity, opposed to Judeo-Christian monotheism, and opposed to Judeo-Christian transcendent morality. The spirituality that resulted was intrinsically pagan, and inherently anti-Christ and anti-Christian.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

A 1954 Air Force Training Manuel had this commentary on these great words which founded the greatest nation in the history of the world:

“The idea uppermost in the minds of men who founded the United States was that each and every human being was important. They were convinced that the importance of the individual did not come from any grant of the state, that the importance of the individual did not come from any position that he had achieved nor from any power he had acquired nor from any wealth he had amassed.

“They knew that the importance of man came from the very source of his life. Because man was made in the image and likeness of God, he had a destiny to achieve. And because he had a destiny to achieve, he had the inalienable right and the inherent freedom to achieve it” (FTAF Manual 50-1).

Thus the question, “If God doesn’t exist, who issues rights to man?” becomes profoundly important. Because the answer is, “Whoever has the power to issue those rights.”

It becomes the State which issues rights to man. And, welcome to come and crush the human spirit, next dictator.

Dude, your Darwinian atheism is Nazi to the damn core. And all Hitler did was logically apply Darwinism to its logical conclusion. Because if evolution is true, we are meat puppets lacking a soul and lacking free will. And since we’re not categorically different from farm animals after all, as the God you despise says in creating man in HIS own image, why not improve the human species using the same techniques we would use to improve our livestock? We would kill all the inferior specimens and encourage the strongest to breed. In other words, if we consistently act like Darwinism logically entails, we would be Nazis.

We can go back to the first true atheist government and the horror that they committed called “the Reign of Terror.” And as since, this ocurred during modernity, when human beings became so “enlightened.” The French Revolution and its atheist government and its reign of terror; the curse of Marxism and murderous Soviet communism; the godless Nazis who worshiped evolution and tried to base their society upon its assurred conclusions; Mao and his murderous Red China. North Korea. North Vietnam. Cambodia and Pol Pot. Cuba. I mean, what they all had in common was atheism and the belief in evolution.

As for your 3), you just don’t even have a clue. Churches give BILLIONS of dollars to help people in need. And they get NO benefit from that other than the benefit of obeying Jesus when He said, “when you do for the least of these, you do for me.”

What I’d like to know is what is your rationale as an atheist that we help one another? Why should I as an atheist give to you when you have nothing to do with my DNA that as a Darwinist I fixate on passing to the next generation? If I have a rival or a competitor, as a Darwinist, why should I love my enemy instead of killing him???

Are you naive enough to think that those who disagree with you are atheists? That’s how it seems. I’m a Christian, and I don’t agree with much of what you say. But I say you’re no Christian, because you have no love in your heart, and you seem to believe everyone should have thoughts and beliefs that are a cookie cutter version of yours. I’m kind of thinking you may be insane.

You know, the things I find most personally despicable is hypocrisy. You sit there and judge me up a storm even as you hate me for being judgmental. If I’m so wrong, why are YOU doing it far worse than the guy you demonize?

Where exactly do you quote me as saying, “everybody who disagrees with me is an atheist”??? Because I seriously don’t recall saying that and frankly call you a liar for insinuating that I do that.

Next, you say you’re a Christian but you disagree with much of what I say. Well, unlike you I’m not so judgmental and intolerant and bitter as to respond to you by saying, “But I say you’re no Christian.” Because you’re far more intolerant than I ever was, hypocrite. I am also not going to assert that “you have no love in your heart” because I don’t really know you the way you so intimately think you know me. I would submit to you that I’m actually far too loving of a person to say something that hateful about somebody I don’t even know. Which then leads to the question, “What’s YOUR problem?”

You also call me insane because you disagree with me. And everybody who disagrees with you must be insane. Even though it’s really, truly wrong to say stuff like that.

Wait. You’re getting me really confused. Because I’m wondering how in the world your skull doesn’t explode from trying to contain all the contradictions.

Anyway, you say that you’re a Christian and you disagree with much of what I say. WHAT do you disagree with that I said as a Christian, pray tell. When you’re going to launch into such a vicious personal attack against me that you denounce me as a false Christian who kicks puppies and hates babies and must be clearly insane in your personal expertise and intimate knoweldge of my psychology, couldn’t you at LEAST be considerate enough to tell me what “you as a Christian” disagree with me about??? Apparently not.

Instead, what you do is absolutely vile. You create a complete straw man (that I believe that anyone who doesn’t think exactly like I do must be an atheist). Then you proceed to substitute your formless, substantless, contentless “Christianity” with mine and declare yours superior without even bothering to think that you have any obligation to tell us what is wrong with my Christianity or explain how your version of “Christianity” contradicts mine. And then you declare yourself the victor in the debate you were too dishonest to actually bother to have.

I think you can get lost now. I frankly have better people to argue with who manage not to demonize me while actually talking about stuff I actually said.